Sato Central Otago Riesling

Winemaking

Although we have aimed to have our own winery facility at our estate, we rent space at Rockburn Winery in Cromwell to make wines at this moment. We set our equipments there and all the wines are handled by Kyoko or me.

Our goal is to make wines which can heal people; soft, delicate, supple, smooth mouth filling wines rather than powerful, heavily structured, aggressively appealing wines. So we decided to take the way of making natural wines – clean and tasty natural wines, but not dirty natural wines. We use only organic or biodynamic grapes and would like to process them in gentle and organic way at the winery; minimum handling of juice, must or wine and, importantly, avoiding adding additives or chemicals to wine during vinification and maturation. We refuse to use SO2. We are keen on maintaining the life of micro organism in wines brought from our vineyards. Chemicals such as SO2 act like herbicide in vineyard; killing wild yeast or bacteria and destroy the beautiful natural harmony among them. We always try to employ as many species of bacteria and yeast as possible in order to preserve natural purity and to create harmonious complexity in our wines. SO2 also prevents juice or wine in process from oxygen contact. We believe Oxygen is quite important to maintain healthy fermentation and keep stability in wines then after. We 3 normally keep our wines in barrels or tanks in much longer period than the other growers here.